A separate reply to Cedric's very interesting question of: Which language would have succeeded if java hadn't.
At first I'm fairly sure C would have kept most of the now java programmers, but I rather doubt C would have become mainstream for web development. Its just spectacularly badly suited to do so. I'm guessing python would have become larger much faster than it has today, and PHP would also have been kludged on more. But, who knows? Maybe the scripting disdain that's lasted so long (well into the middle 2000s) would have meant someone rolled up a garbage collected C variant with a standard library set well-suited to building web apps. On Dec 4, 8:01 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Neil Bartlett <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm *not* surprised that he didn't mention the Date and Calendar APIs. > > He should have, but I'm not surprised he didn't. I'm also not > > surprised that he failed to mention primitives and arrays. > > Careful with revisionism here. > > I think the decision to have primitives is one of the subtle details that > made Java the success it is today. Back then, performance was a huge deal > and it took years before Java's speed started being perceived as "good > enough". With that in mind, using objects for everything would have been a > terrible mistake, one that might have turned Java into an interesting > language that was soon sent back to the dark corners of programming language > history. > > It's always dangerous to reexamine past decisions with present insight. > > A more interesting hypothetical question to me is what language would have > emerged if Java hadn't succeeded... > > -- > Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
